corporate jargon equals verbal play doh

Beyond their meaning, words also differ according to how easy they are to pronounce. People generally prefer not to think more than necessary, and they tend to prefer objects, people, products, and words that are simple to pronounce and understand. In 2006, my colleague Daniel Oppenheimer and I investigated the performance of hundreds of stocks imm

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At my own workplaces, the New Age–speak mingled recklessly with aviation metaphors ( holding pattern, the concept of discussing something at the 30,000-foot level), verbs and adjectives shoved into nounhood ( ask, win, fail, refresh, regroup, creative, sync, touchbase ), nouns shoved into verbhood ( whiteboard, bucket ), and a heap of nonwords that

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And yet it should be possible to gaze into this alphabet soup and divine patterns. Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re

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And so with every exchange, you have to acknowledge a reality where words like optionality and deliverable could be just as solid as blimp and pretzel. What happens if you ask a Megan or a Steph Korey or an Adam Neumann what they mean? I imagine a box with a series of false bottoms; you just keep falling deeper and deeper into gibberish. The meanin

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"Portmanteau words are now a staple of the magazine competition, and amid the waste of failed invention, every so often one meets a need: smog, stagflation, chocoholic. I don't know how we ever did without 'metrosexual', coined by my friend Mark Simpson."

On the one hand, language is a wonderful tool. It allows us to describe these other worlds in metaphors that help us think and imagine them. But there are many places where our language leaves us in the lurch. Like with vision, we don’t have a word for detecting light but not having a conscious experience of it.

This has turned communicators of all kinds – from fashion influencers to public health specialists – into Kremlinologists who obsessively analyze the behavior of social media algorithms in the hopes of learning how to please them and (more importantly) how to avoid their punishments.

Hence algospeak. Social media users have learned the hard way that... See more

Reaching wide audiences requires all-terrain language, and the urgency of the present moment, amplified by chronological feeds, doesn’t allow for much stylistic variety. Efficiency is key — compressing as much information as possible to the least amount of words is the ideal of all communication.

While I do agree that many areas of interaction, like... See more

My generic career advice for young people is that if at all possible, you should aim to work on something that no one has a word for. Spend your energies where we don’t have a name for what you are doing, where it takes a while to explain to your mother what it is you do. When you are ahead of language, that means you are in a spot where it is mor

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